Start here: the Lorida sea cow thing

For reports with both water and land intervals, include the sequence and timing. Review depends on order of events more than the label in the title. boring, yes. useful, also yes.

Calm is a behavior note, not confirmation. Calm in water, calm at water, and calm after leaving water are three different observations. Stop making me type this, Dan.

Do not make land vs water a yes/no cage. Write the order you saw: grass, water, grass again, or whatever. A messy 'idk' beats a confident fairy tale.

Can we add 'what you DON'T know' to the sticky? New people think uncertainty makes the post weaker. It usually makes it readable.

I object to being named in spirit here, but fine, the puddle cow was not my best work.

The first photo should be wide enough that another person can disagree with you intelligently. If all we see is brown + blue pixels, we are back in the soup.

This actually helped. I was about to post a crop first because it looked more impressive, which I now understand is how fights start.

Sticky updated in place. Wide first, crop second, private location removed. If the location is your neighbor's exact pond, don't put it in public like a walnut.

Also write down sounds if there are any. People laugh until the video has wind noise and one uncle saying 'she always does that' in the background.

Distance estimate can be ugly. 'Across one gravel lane' is better than leaving it blank because you don't know meters. Nobody is grading your trig.

Please do not put the classification in the title. Put the observation in the title. The thread can ruin itself later without help.

Seconding this because titles like REAL SEA COW 100% make the Recent page look like a malware forum from 2003.

If the animal leaves water and keeps acting ordinary, mention that too. The return to land is not a debunk. It is literally part of the event.

Land interval, water interval, land interval again. That is not contradiction, that is sequence. I will die on this boring hill.

Locking nothing. Keep using this thread for first-post questions so the board does not grow twelve baby stickies with worse titles.

I would like the record to show my puddle cow had AMBITION even if it did not have evidence. This board forgets nothing except where it put the upload instructions.

Originally posted by Moderator:

post the scene before the theory

This. This is what I have been yelling since the old blue theme. Half of you start with 'what if the water is calling them' and then forget to mention it was a birdbath.

Sticky should say to save your typed post before uploading. The attachment page ate my paragraph twice in 2006 and I still have not emotionally recovered.